Madeleine Kelly’s paintings present an inscrutable iconography, drawing on complex associations — from contemporary politics to classical mythology and the artist’s own concern with environmental degradation. While Kelly often engages topical issues, her work is never didactic.

These two paintings were created out of the artist’s concern with humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels and the devastating consequences this will have. Kelly says she ‘investigated the archaeological metaphor and its potential to create new meaning . . . to represent our relationship with the environment, both natural and artificial’. The end result is a persistent sense of foreboding.